Is a Fully Electric Future possible?

IS A FULLY ELECTRIC FUTURE POSSIBLE?

Where we are now Vs where we’re going

The future is like smoke: it can vaguely be seen, can take any shape, but can’t be touched. These intangible tendencies can allow anyone to make wild predictions about the future but it doesn’t mean that the predictions will be right. There is no guarantee that anything will turn out the way we expect it to. However, using various techniques, we can at least hope to increase the accuracy of our predictions.

When responding to the question, “It’s 2016, Where is my flying car?”, from an audience member, renown physicist Dr Michio Kaku responded, “Was it the scientists who promised you flying cars?! No, it was the cartoonists!” It matters who makes predictions because one party could be rooted in imagination, which is encouraged and gives goals to strive towards and the other party in logic which helps manage expectations.

There is a common saying that, ‘Japan is 20 years ahead of the rest of the word’. This is mostly in relation to its enviable record of accomplishment in tech and infrastructure. Japan already has more electric car charge points than petrol/diesel fuelling stations while the rest of the world is only beginning to pass legislation that is pro-electric-vehicle. However impressive Japan is, the sentiment that it is ahead of the world is a bitter-sweet one because when there is little or no wind rather harmful smog can build up (the side effects of rapid industrialization). So as much as we are inspired by Japan we should take note of their shortcomings and if possible avoid them. Instead of waiting for the air quality to deteriorate we could try and curb the things that affect air quality negatively. A good example of a step in the right direction is a carbon tax. Some governments are also giving tax breaks to citizens who purchase electric vehicles while at the same time investing in the required infrastructure (electric charging points) making them more affordable, accessible and practical.

China is also pioneering quite a few interesting technologies in the electric vehicle space. No, an electric vehicle manufacturer from China, are producing incredible, world-class electric cars at fairer prices than competitors in the same field. This is great news but the disruption that I want to point out is not in the vehicles but on the roads. On a highway in Jinan, a city in eastern China, researchers have built a stretch of road that can charge electric cars on the go. This experimental project has taken over 10 years to implement and has pushed engineering to its limits. They put solar panels under transparent concrete and found a way to store and retransmit the energy back to the surface of the road where it would be readily available for electric and autonomous cars. The smart road also collects data and delivers weather and traffic updates. Once perfected, this project can be implemented the world over.

How do we make Africa fully electric?

The situation in Africa is far from ideal. According to a report by the Centre for Global Development in 2015, about 80 million Nigerians live without access to electricity. In 2017, the World Bank stated that out of the 1.1 billion without access to electricity, about 600 million of them are in Sub- Saharan Africa, and mostly in rural areas.

Africa poses a unique challenge and therefore it requires a special approach. Governments have always undertaken the majority of electricity generation projects in Africa. However as populations began to boom and industrial development increased as well, all that coupled with poor planning, have led to more pressure being excreted on these electrical grids. To ease this, governments need to encourage private sector involvement in electricity generation. In Kenya, a rural area resident by the name John Magiro decided to stop waiting for the government and set up his own power generation centre that supplies electricity to his remote village. The young man, barely 25 years old, did not have a proper education but only happened to be fascinated by the dynamo on his bicycle. He figured that he could set up something similar powered by the local river. Since 2013, John has supplied electricity to about 300 homes that previously did not have access to it. We need more self-starters like John and private energy companies that can undertake the challenge of producing renewable energy in order to get more rural homes connected to the grid.

When looking at global trends in energy and the cost of setting up an electrical grid, we need to ask ourselves if electric grids are the best alternative in terms of cost and environmental impact. In recent years, the world has begun to embrace decentralized power generation as a viable alternative. M-kopa Solar, a Kenyan start-up is taking advantage of existing solar and battery tech to connect more

and more off-grid homes. Tesla is also providing the solar roof and power wall on top of the electric car in order to give an emissions-free purely electric alternative. This is why Elon Musk purchased stock in Solar City (one of America's largest solar companies)in 2016. The deal was valued at a whopping $ 2.6 billion.

The US government’s NationalAcademy of Engineering, to study the emerging energy technologies and determine the most feasible alternative for the future, tasked the research team at Google Inc. The team cited solar energy as the most promising alternative. The solar industry is using advanced tech like nanotechnology to reduce the price of manufacturing while improving the performance of the solar cells. While attempting to explain the merits of solar energy to world leaders, Google’s head of engineering Ray Kurzweil got the question ‘do we have enough sunlight to meet all of the world’s energy needs?’ His response was ‘yes, we have 10,000 more times solar energy than we need.’

Can Battery Tech meet the world’s needs?

There are endless possibilities of what can be achieved with finding creative new ways of generating electricity. However, without finding a proper way of storing all that energy, it is akin to playing a zero-sum game.

Batteries may be defined as banks for energy. You put energy in when you don’t need it, and get some out when you do need it.

You need electric energy to power your devices. However, it can be stored as any kind of energy. There were headlines a while back about a $3 billion plan to turn America’s Hoover dam into a giant battery. This would work by turning excess electric energy into gravitational potential energy. Picture this, two lakes, one at the bottom and another at the top. When there is lower demand for electricity, the excess current pumps more water up into the lake at the top and when the demand for power increases the water in the top lake is used to generate more energy and meet demand. It’s called pumped hydro-electric storage.

Large scale production of renewable energy is a natural choice since solar and wind are cheap, clean and abundant. However, they are only available when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. That means they may be quite unreliable. In order to soothe this problem, batteries could be used to compensate for the off-peak moments while charging during peak performance. Cities are choosing to use batteries to power surplus demand instead of fuel and coal-powered plants, which happen to pollute the environment.

On a smaller scale, there is increasing demand for battery-powered cars, homes and mobile phones. This pressure is pushing battery manufactures to the cutting edge of technology. People want faster-charging batteries that last for longer in between charges while sustaining heavy usage and have longer overall battery life. A few innovative companies are rising to the occasion and finding ways to deliver on this list of demands. Samsung tried to lengthen battery life in between charges while allowing for heavy usage by using a cooling system in the flagship model Note 9. Another company, Charge Point, uses a cooling system in the charging cable to allow for quick charging of electric vehicles, achieving a twenty-five per cent charge in 5 minutes and even a ninety per cent charge in 15 minutes. The protocol used to charge batteries has effectively remained the same for the past 100 years but G Batteries, a start-up, is using a new piece of tech called ABMS (Active Battery Management Systems) to change this. ABMS uses a charging algorithm to optimize the way batteries charge and on the average smartphone, they were getting a fifty per cent charge in 5 minutes while also doubling the long-term battery life. It’s just a matter of time before all this tech becomes mainstream.

With results such as these, a fully electric future is affordable and possible.

The future looks good.